The pretty blue shiny thing

So I got stung by a jellyfish today, but it was only my fingers. The remarkable part was that I was warned, and my friend had already gotten stung. I thought I would be unable to get in the water if there were jellyfish in it, but we’re in Cabo, and it’s 87 degrees, and the water is beautiful! I put on some goggles and went out there, determined to be careful and look around me. I mean, you know how Jellyfish are all cartooney and big and white and obvious. Or not. In the meantime, I saw this thing that looked like a fishing lure, and it even looked like it had a metal part, so I thought I’d grab it and put it in the trash on the shore so that nobody gets hurt. Grabbing that little fishing lure felt like grabbing an electric fence with razor wire, and that’s when I realized that I’d reached out and grabbed a jellyfish. It HURT! I had to go straight to the bar and ask for ice, and then I rejoined my friends in their cabana next to the pool. It didn’t hurt, as long as I kept my fingers in my cup of ice. Grocery shopping was on our agenda after the beach, and I was about as useful as Captain Hook.
Later in the evening I was walking along the beach at sunset with one of my travel companions, Tracy, and we saw some tiny blue things on the sand. More pretty fishing lures? We both realized they had to be jellyfish, and Tracy said she remembered an Australian girl at the pool saying that the jellyfish here are blue something. We looked them up when we got home, and found jellyfish that matched the description of the ones we saw on the sand. They’re called Blue Bottle Jellyfish. Then I typed that into Flikr, my current favorite website, and some of the images in the set were also of Portuguese Man of Wars. Tim came up behind me while we were looking at the images, and he’s like, “you got stung by a Portuguese Man of War?” And I’m like, “No, they’re just in the same photo set because they’re blue and they’re like Jellyfish.” Then we looked up information about the Blue Bottles, and we found out they ARE Man of Wars. What the hell!! So we were stung by Man O Wars. It looks like the ones in the Atlantic are much worse than these ones, and that’s where they get such a bad reputation. These are TINY.
So yeah, I didn’t just get stung by it, I reached out and grabbed it, and got stung by it.

Additional, better photos of these beautiful bastards can be found here.

Engaged!

So, I’ve been living in Playa for 10 months now. I’m loving it, and Tim and I got engaged back in May. I dove deeply into Bikram Yoga, starting with the 30 day challenge in January. I did the challenge again in April and July. Sweating for 90 minutes eats up most of my evening time that I used to spend blogging. That, and we both like to do a lot of cooking.

It’s a beautiful art deco ring with a miner’s cut stone. The ring is from around 1910, from Tim’s mom’s aunt.
It was a nice overcast day, with blue sky peeking at us in places. This was what the beginning of our hike looked like:


But in my memory, it looks like this, because that was the day we got engaged, and I’m a gooey, fluffy romantic at heart:

Here are some other pictures from our engagement in Sycamore Canyon, just north of Malibu.